Carmen Papalia

"Caning In the City"

The last stop when touring Dublin's Guiness Brewery is a sky-bar where visitors
receive a complimentary pint of the world-famous draft. The taps are located
at the centre of the room, and plush leather sofas line the edge of the bar's
floor-to-ceiling windows. The brewery offers the best view of Dublin in town,
and a number of postcard cityscapes have been taken there. From the top of the
tower Temple Bar, party central in Dublin, looks just like any road would from
above--its' famous pubs are reduced to building blocks, and its' swarms of patrons
disapear. Looking down, with pint in hand, one becomes a voyeur, and is able
to see the city as a system.

Michel De Certeau says from this distance the city becomes a text, readable,
and such a view is impossible through the act of walking. "To be lifted
to the summit of the World Trade Centre is to be lifted out of the citys' grasp." On
street-level Certeau's walkers become blind to the forces that govern a city
ie: social, political, economic, structural. But suppose there was no other
option than to walk a city blind; how does one "see" a city when the
only choice they have is to cane through it? Upon investigating Ryan Knighton's "Charles
Street, Pandemonium" I am confident that he provides an answer to Certeau's
theory.

The day after Elliott and I visited the Guiness Brewery, we were scheduled
to meet Vancouver indie-punk band You Say Party! We Say Die! at Temple Bar for
an interview. Just having completed a list of questions for them seconds before
jumping on a train, we were running late. The last minutes of daylight were
falling away into a brilliant sunset, and as I watched the passing landscape
I realized my nervousness. At the time, I had been on the road for close to
two months, I was about to interview a band I admired, and it was getting increasingly
more difficult to see due to my night-blindness.

Throughout the UK Elliott had been my sighted guide, but still the thought
of walking blind in a city that was foreign to me was a bit overwehlming. As
we travelled our planned route we found that each stop on the map posed a new
equation, a system to solve. The traffic of a city, its' layout, and the characteristics
and patterns of its' walkers were all variables, and changed dramatically from
place to place. Throughout our journey Elliott had guided me through museums,
smokey music venues, and crowded punk clubs, and with each new challenge he
was becoming a better guide. As time passed he was able to develop an eye for
anything that might be important to mention ie: curbs, traffic-lights, obstructions,
oblivious pedestrians, oddly placed construction etc. He began to see as I do,
blindly. In order to experience the Vancouver Knighton paints in "Charles
Street, Pandemodium" we as readers must first, like Elliott, understand
what it means to see a thing blindly.

People with partial vision, when attempting to "see" something,
tend to simplify any visual details in order to better understand the thing
as a whole. In this way a line of pedestrians becomes a solid wall of matter,
and is not understood as a group of individuals, but instead, as a separate
singular thing. Importance is placed on the fragment, and the stitching together
of those fragments to build a general understanding. It is only when one canes
the city that they become "touched into / by blindness", and are able
to read the city as a system. "Descartes, in his Regulae, had already made
the blind man the guarantor of the knowledge of things and places against the
illusions and deceptions of vision." In this way the view from the summit
is useless, flawed, and the blind become some of the only walkers who do not "lack" a
place as they walk it, but write a place as they read it.

In "Charles street, Pandemodium" Knighton walks a post-Expo Vancouver
with the ghost of his blind buddy John Milton. He indtroduces the long-deceased
author of "Paradise Lost" to his neighborhood, Commercial Drive, and
comes to recognize similarities between it and the Pandemodium that Milton describes
in his famous epic. As Ryan tries to impress Milton with what his generation
has done with the modern metropolis, using Vancouver as a microcosm, he notices
Milton's lack of enthusiasm, "is that all there is to witness?", and
begins then to critique the city as he revisits it.

But it is not a linear tour of Vancouver that Knighton leads Milton, and
his readers on--it is a glitchy, fragmented experience of place. One can almost
imagine the two, Knighton and Milton, unexpectedly bumping into the places they
encounter. Knighton separates particular sections with an , which he uses as
a barrier or obstruction, forcing his reader to either cross quickly into another
place, or stay back and re-trace steps. These markings both tend to disorient
the reader, and alternately, serve as landmarks, a point for the reader to rest,
reflect and organize themselves before moving on. Like Certeau's walkers, Knighton's
readers have the choice to experience the text as they please--one can either
climb the wall or turn back. But they are not constrained to one trejectory,
Knighton's scattered path suggests that the journey is not as important as the
moments that it is built from. These "jumps" of place and subject
provide "flashes" of vision, individual sketches that together construct
Knighton's Vancouver.

As Elliott and I exited the train station we encountered a mass of people,
all rushing to their prospective destinations: pubs, World Cup parties, and
even the Guns 'n Roses show that was taking place at one of Dublin's larger
venues. The sidewalk seemed to be solid with pedestrians, and my night-blindness
was in full effect. It was common for me to take Elliott's elbow in situations
such as this, so he could easily guide me out of harms' way, but at the time
the walk-able area of the sidewalk was too dense to accommodate for the width
of two bodies. As we became enveloped by the crowd Elliott said, "just
follow my lead, I'll give you the directions." Once again, Elliott had
to see the movement of the walkers as a system in order to get us through safely.
He began listing directions aloud, "bank right ... to your left now ...
okay, we're coming to a curb." As Elliott carved a path through the maze
of unaware pedestrians, and provided me with "flashes" of vision,
I was able to navigate flawlessly, and without the aid of an elbow. Although
blind, I was able to understand the forces, and structures that governed sidewalk
travel at the time. Certeau's walkers, like the unaware pedestrians in Dublin,
are blind to such forces:

These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen;
their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each others' arms.
The paths that intersect in this intertwining unrecognized poems.

Readers begin to notice Knighton's critical eye as he makes his first steps
with Milton on Charles Street, just off Commercial Drive. As he reflects on
the places he visits, it is clear to see that Knighton holds a "vision" that
the general population is blind to. This is reminiscent of the Wordsworthian
idea that the poet is gifted with a greater soul. But I am confident that in
this case Knighton's unique, poetic eye is connected to the Cartesian idea that
the visual world is unstable and untrustworthy. This is why Knighton is able
to resist interpelation, and view Vancouver's prime spots: Commercial Drive,
Stanley Park and downtown Vancouver from an alternative perspective.

As Knighton shows Milton his own "plot", Vancouver, he becomes
increasingly less optomistic about it. His imagery suggests a degree of desparation
and decline:

The municipal lamps
border Parker Street
crook their wanting necks looming buzzards over the fattened body
this smokey metropolis, this brand of leviathan we persue
only to walk casually inside.
We too have purchased a palace beside boiling waters. Ashen towers

Knighton sees the city as a metropolis, a "brand of leviathan",
and realizes that his Vancouver is out of his hands--a living, breathing thing
that is growing out of control. This idea, that the city takes on a life and
has an identity, is something Certeau suggests in relation to the concept-city:

The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions
by materializing today the Utopia that yesterday was only painted. The 1370
foot high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the
fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable, and
immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.

Through his word-use and subject matter readers come to understand that Knighton
is aware of the social, political and economic forces that have transformed
his city. "pushed to the edge of False Creek by cmmittees," and "they
have never been exposed to an original revolution and think they want one /
or are one.

Through these passages Knighton investigates the social feel of one of Vancouvers'
most progressive areas, Commercial Drive, after the buzz of Expo '86. Although
he calls Charles Street his neighbourhood, Knighton steps back and criticizes
the "freaks behind sunglasses" who, with their hounds, also call the
area home. Through his text he suggests that there exists a bigger picture that
the Commercial Drive punks can't see. As he and Milton drift into their realm
for a moment they assume the role of the voyeur, in certeau's sense of the word,
but at times both hold a stance that is representative of the flaneur. One gets
the impression that although Knighton is critical of Vancouver, he does not
have the power, or even the interest to regenerate his Vancouver back into a
paradise. Similar to "Paradise Lost", the story begins in medias res,
when the force which was Expo had already hit, and had forever sculpted the
citys' identity. Through his abstraction and defamiliarization of Vancouver,
Knighton becomes estranged, and blindly guides Milton through a ghosted city.

As Knighton attempts to describe a thriving Vancouver, it becomes clear that
even he is unsure as to what vancouver really is, or has become. He fails to
provide Milton and the reader with a "proper name" to describe the
city, something that Certeau states brings order and gives meaning.

It was not a beast in need of a name, it
was like the stories of a whale that was like a mountain that was like an island
alive like a whale
that is in a sea
if the earth is a stone
in that sea it is
an island to a whale
or a whale itself. It is the problem
of likeness, see it swallowed up in the city's core

This "problem of likeness" resists any solidarity, suggesting that
the smoldering metropolis that stands before the two men is in transition, either
becoming something great or deteriorating--the author is unsure. Certeau suggests
that through the use of proper names ie: place names, city names, street names,
a greater understanding of the system can be reached. When one attaches proper
names: Charles Street, Stanley Park, Commercial Drive, to a travelled route,
the journey, or process, is better understood. The "dotted line" that
a walker both leaves and blindly follows, becomes solid, readable. However through
his descriptions, Knighton does not sketch for his readers the lines that Vancouver
will leave, but instead suggests that the displacement throughout his city was
due to a cataclysmic shift. In this way, the reader experiences Knighton's Vancouver
on a synchronic axis, with no reference to the past. Readers are then left to
scrounge the fragmented lanscape for the pieces of a structure--something Knighton
enacts throughout his "long-poem" of walking" by amply providing
the reader with broken sketches, flashes of partial vision.

In a section entitled "The Pedestrian Speech Act", Certeau offers
a possible solution for this fragmentation, and suggests that, similar to language,
there exists a "rhetoric of walking". He compares the act of walking
to the speech act, and concludes that they are similar in that both work within
a system, and have particular limitations and freedoms within that system. "The
act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or
to the statements uttered." In this way stylistic literary devices can
be applied to walking, and one can derive new and alternate meanings from a
pedestrian's travelled route. Certeau suggests that synecdoche provides an accurate
representation of how people tend to understand their trejectories:

"Synecdoche consists in "using a word in a sense
which is part of another meaning of the same word. In essence, it names a part
instead of the whole which includes it. Thus "sail" is taken for "ship" in
the expression "a fleet of fifty sails"; in the same way, a brick
shelter or a hill is taken for the park in the narration of a trajectory.

If one applies synecdoche to Knighton's trejectory throughout "Charles
Street, Pandemodium" his collection of "broken sketches" begin
to come together, and are framed by an overarching narrative.

In Michel De Certeau's "Walking In The City" he begins with an
image of Manhattan from the summit of the World Trade Centre. Lifted out of
the city's grasp he is able to read the city as a text, a view he says is impossible
while walking. From his understanding, Certeau paints pedestrians as mindless
drones, unaware of the forces that govern their travel. However as an individual
with partial vision, i am lead to believe otherwise. For me, the view from above
provides only a fragmented and skewed image of the city as a whole, and I am
unable to, like Certeau, focus and critique. It is only through caning the city
that I receive information about my surroundings. My constant contact with the
street through the scraping of my cane provides me with a direct, uninfluenced
connection to visual information. In order to navigate through a crowd or busy
sidewalk, I must be aware of patterns and structures, the characteristics of
fellow walkers. It is only through street travel that the "visually independant" are
able to read a city.

Carmen Papalia is an honors student at Simon Fraser Unversity, in
Vancouver B.C., and Editor of Memewar Magazine, a multi-disciplinary magazine. Selections of his work can be found in Sub-terrain, The Capilano Courier, The Liar,and in Memewar. He is currently writing "Pocket Vision", a text that explores his own degenerating vision. .